MBA’s galore at Caterpillar’s law department

“[Caterpillar] has paid for dozens of attorneys to earn MBAs from the University of Chicago.”. Since the department has 179 attorneys — of which only 58 are US-based — that means quite a high percentage have taken advantage of this professional development opportunity, all of which is reported in Corp. Counsel, Vol. 15, June 2008 at 103.

This also suggests to me that the law department has negotiated a special arrangement and perhaps discounted tuition costs from that business school. Perhaps these are executive MBA degrees. Even so, the investment by the law department is enormous, unless the company funds such professional development.

Other law departments have subsidized graduate studies for their senior lawyers, but none that I have heard of have done so at this scale (See my posts of Nov. 6, 2005: GC of National Australia Bank; May 14, 2005: executive education courses for in-house counsel; Jan. 27, 2006: Bethlehem Steel’s GC; April 12, 2006: executive education courses; Aug. 26, 2006 #3: GC of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab; Nov. 25, 2006 and June 16, 2006 #3: a UK program to grant MBA’s to in-house counsel; and Dec. 31, 2006: JD/MBA joint degrees.).